Another Amazon binge. Things will be coming through my letterbox for the next few days. This isn’t technically a book review but rather a review of a phrasal template word game book that gives insight into Recombinant Meme Engineering (RME), as tool for cliotechnology.
Mad-Libs bills itself as the world’s greatest word game which requires players to provide a list of words which are then inserted into a sentences. The result being some gramatically correct, but amusing story. Viewers of the BBC’s Have I Got News For You will be familair with their round where some words are blanked out from a news headline for the contestants fill in, usually with call back humor established earlier in the show. The effect can be surreal.
The back cover gives an example (filled in blanks underlined):
“Every morning before washing your cat, massage it gently with a/an doorknob that has been soaked overnight an a/an pencil box full of warm corn oil.”
Hilarious. The comedic effect comes from violation of selection restrictions; such as doing something with something it is not meant to do. By throwing in arbetary words, the game deliberatly forces players to overcomes functional fixedness to generate giggle worthy nonsense.
From a memetic perspective, the process adheres to grammar and innovates semantic content, which we can attempt to apprehend some meaning. However it clashes with our cultural understandings, derailing our tramlined notions and challenging our epsistemological memes. In releasing us from cognitive bias, then the game becomes an exploration of memetic phase space, allowing for memetic combinations that are hitherto unlikely given our mental funnels. The vast majority of the recombinations are inviable, or just plain silly; others do have potential for creativity and may lead to potentially danq new memes.
Snow clones are a related concept, described by Geoffrey K. Pullum as “some-assembly-required adaptable cliché frames for lazy journalists.” These are often a popular phrase, possibly a quote from a film, or advert, whereby the key words are treated as variable but their relationships are preserved. These are adapted to the social context- they are very geeky and form the basis of many internet memes.
“Brown is the new black” can be abstracted to
“X is the new Y” and reinstantiated to such as
“Snowclones are the new eggcorns“
Mad-libs thereby offers a tool for RME, and it is only a matter of time before their automated software generation takes on a serious practical note.
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